If you have ZEROBOXER, you’ll notice how similar the query letter is to the final back cover copy of the book. The query letter formed the basis of the pitch that her agent submitted to editors, who then used it internally at the publishing house, and eventually the production team morphed it into the back copy. So love your query letter, because you may well be seeing some form of it on the back of your published novel.

Every once in a while, a creative idea punches your buttons so hard you lose the power to speak and drool runs slowly off your chin. When an idea strikes your writerly pleasure center with that kind of force, you damn well move it to the top of your project list. Some books come easy and some come hard, but the ideas that make you wet yourself feel easier, no matter how thorny your plot problem of the day is. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could be at your door, and you would still run to your keyboard in the morning to work. From Terrible Minds: Five Things I Learned Writing Zeroboxer

The Strategic Author

A cursory glance at the number of writing conferences in the country and the number of people who attend them each year will give you an idea of the staggering number of aspiring writers out there. Only a tiny percentage of those people will ever go on to publication. A smaller number will go on to be published multiple times, and an even smaller number yet will ever make a reasonable income as professional writers. Ultimately, the difference lies not in talent, work ethic, or connections, but in mindset, strategies, and habits. Fonda Lee shares observations gleaned and lessons learned in the formative early years of a writing career, leading up and after the publication of a debut novel.

Fonda Lee spent a decade as a corporate strategist for Fortune 500 companies prior to becoming a science fiction and fantasy author. Her sci-fi novel Zeroboxer (Flux/Llwellyn) came out in 2015; she was named the Willamette Writers Up and Coming Award winner that year. Fonda’s second novel releases from Scholastic in early 2017.

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”